


This Vibrant Skin

by Remeinhu



Series: These Fragile Bodies [1]
Category: Six - Marlow/Moss
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beheaded Cousins, Developing Relationship, F/F, Gen, Medicine, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Pre-Slash, Reincarnation, Skin picking/dermatotillomania, adjusting to the 21st Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:22:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25213120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remeinhu/pseuds/Remeinhu
Summary: When Anne Boleyn and her fellow queens wake up after almost five hundred years, there's quite a bit they must adjust to--not least of which is discovering the ins and outs of how to understand the ways their bodies work in the twenty-first century.
Relationships: Anne Boleyn & Katherine Howard, Anne Boleyn/Catherine Parr
Series: These Fragile Bodies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800094
Comments: 95
Kudos: 162





	1. Chapter 1

When Anne Boleyn woke up after nearly five centuries of nothingness, she brought her hands, reflexively, to her neck, frowning as she encountered a slender band of tissue that was raised and puffy and smooth, too smooth.

It felt wrong.

Still foggy-headed and unthinking, she began to scrape at the edges of the scar with her fingernail, as if it were a bit of loose paste between two sheets of paper, sticking out untidily and begging to be flicked off.

Then she felt a sharp sting, and a bit of sticky wetness at the tips of her index and middle fingers. It snapped her into fuller awareness, and she jerked her hands away from her neck and down to her sides, grasping at the fabric of the shift she seemed to be wearing in an attempt to still them. She sat up and attempted to take stock of her surroundings.

She was lying on a bed that was impossibly springy, in a room that was impossibly bright, filled with objects she couldn’t even begin to identify. Some things were more familiar—there was a set of shelves filled with things that must be books, although they were clearly made with different materials than the books she’d encountered in her day, and there were more of them than even a noble family could hope to afford. But others—the thin, hard, brightly-colored object somewhat larger and thinner than a deck of playing cards that she saw on the table beside her bed and lit up when she touched the shallow circular dip at the bottom, for example—she hadn’t the faintest reference for.

Her neck itched, and she was vibrating with restlessness, desperate to relieve it. But she knew better—everyone knew that you didn’t open up the skin any more than necessary; that was how evil humors got in. She’d already courted too much danger by drawing that little bit of blood in her initial fog. She wondered whether she might find some kind of salve, somewhere, and perhaps some linen to wrap it with and draw out whatever poison was causing the irritation.

Experimentally, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her bare feet met smooth wooden boards—well, that was familiar enough, at least—and she looked down and took stock of her body. Her skin seemed pinker and slightly paler than it had been, her form more muscular and generously curved—as she moved her hands over her torso she noted with a certain satisfaction that her breasts seemed fuller, too—and her face felt somewhat rounder, her nose shorter and her mouth wider. She ran her fingers through her hair, bringing it over her shoulders to examine it, and saw that while it was a similar dark reddish-brown, it only reached her upper back now, instead of her waist.

And, of course, there was that scar. She fingered it again, gingerly, and had the uncomfortable sense that if she dwelt there for too much longer, something terrible and momentous would break through and overwhelm her. She’d heard stories of what happened in the Low Countries when the dykes failed and the North Sea came roaring through to inundate the farms and towns and reclaim what land had been painstakingly wrested from it. She felt now as though she were waiting for something similar to happen in her own mind, and yet it was only with considerable effort that she managed to wrench her hands away from her neck once more.

_Salve. Linen._ She attempted, carefully, to stand, and when she was satisfied that she was steady enough she padded over to what seemed like a storage chest. After some fumbling, through which she determined that the compartments pulled straight forward rather than hinging aside as she was used to, she was able to examine the chest’s contents. She found several interesting items—what looked like men’s hose (surely a mistake) made of woven fabric that stretched like knit and gleamed like cloth of gold, things that by their shape must be foundation garments but seemed impossibly and immodestly small—each of which could have distracted her for ages, if not for the fact that her neck continued to itch and smart, reminding her that she hadn’t yet found the two things she was looking for.

Well, if they weren’t in this room, could they be outside of it? She tried the door with trepidation, the action somehow threatening to bring the dreaded wave crashing over her again, so she was immensely relieved to find that it swung open easily. So easily, in fact—it was far lighter than the doors she remembered—that the force with which she had pulled it threw her briefly off-balance and slammed the bottom of it into her exposed toes.

“Ouch!” she shouted, and then paused when she realized that this was a word she’d never uttered in her life. She wasn’t sure what it meant, except that her mind seemed to have volunteered it as an apt expression of surprise and pain. And now, as she looked around, she realized that names for some of the unfamiliar items were trickling into her mind, as if the blow to her foot had triggered their release—for example, the hard, rectangular object on the bedside table was a _phone_ or a _mobile,_ and she sensed vaguely that she could use it to send messages and discover information.

She was about to go and pick up the _phone_ , feeling increasingly giddy at the thought that she could learn potentially _anything_ just by swiping her fingers across its surface—apparently _that_ was called a _screen_ , even though it looked nothing like the ornamental fire-grates and partitions the word should have described—when her neck twinged again, sending another small tremor of panic through her gut and pulling her out into the hallway beyond her door in search of something to soothe it.

She crept carefully along the hallway, until she saw an open door leading into a _very_ brightly lit (yet somehow windowless?) room that was finished in a variety of hard, shiny surfaces ( _tile, plastic, linoleum,_ her mind supplied belatedly). She peered inside and saw built-in basins of varying sizes ( _sink, toilet, shower-bath_ )—and then, above the _sink_ she saw a small cupboard. A _medicine cabinet_ —aha. Yes, this was what she was looking for.

She pulled the cabinet open carefully, recalling her experience with the door to the room she’d woken up in. Inside it, there were several shelves bearing a variety of pots, tubes, boxes and rolls, which she examined one-by-one. They all seemed to have writing on them, writing which was both familiar and deeply _off._ She picked up one of the pots, laboriously puzzling out the words “petroleum jelly” in an eerily uniform hand on its label. She got the general sense that what was inside was somehow meant for wounds and irritated skin; maybe it had the drawing properties she needed? She pried the lid off of it, dabbed out some of the thick, shiny substance inside, and rubbed it experimentally on a small section of the inflamed tissue encircling her neck. It did seem to soothe it somehow, so she rubbed it along the rest of the scar, the need to relieve the itching overpowering the increasingly strong sense of dread she felt the more she touched it. Where had it come from? She really didn’t want to know.

Just as she was finishing, she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, and she turned towards the door. Standing there was a woman with skin the color of dark honey and wildly curly black hair. She was wearing the same sort of loose shift that Anne had woken up in, and for all that she looked uncomfortable and ill-at-ease, Anne somehow couldn’t take her eyes off her.

“Who…are you?” Anne ventured. She met the woman’s eyes (a deep, liquid brown that she would have been happy to keep staring into for ages) but as soon as she did so the woman flinched and looked down at the floor.

“Catherine…Catherine Parr,” the woman replied hesitantly, her voice a warm, rich mezzo-soprano.

_Parr…that name sounds familiar somehow. Wasn’t he married to one of Queen Catherine’s ladies at court?_ The recollection sent another wave of panic through her, this one the strongest yet. _Was I at court? I had to have been…_ She gripped the rim of the sink to steady herself. _Wait, wasn’t I Queen at one point?_ Her insides seemed to have turned to water.

Catherine didn’t seem to notice Anne’s unsteadiness, for she continued, picking up some speed as she spoke, “I was Henry’s sixth and last wife. I would guess by the scar that you are either his second wife, or his fifth—are you Anne or Katherine?”

“I am Anne,” she stammered back, the deluge looming over her inexorably. “How did…” Damn it, she didn’t want to know, and she regretted the words as soon as they’d escaped her lips, but the damage was already done.

“Well, I assume the scar was from the beheading…” Catherine looked up then and clapped a hand over her mouth in horror when she saw Anne’s face. “I’m sorry—!” She reached out, but by then the roaring in Anne’s ears drowned out anything else she might have said as the sea-wall—the dyke that had been holding back the memories of the crowd on Tower Green, the scaffold, and the glint of early-summer sun on the sword—burst. Inundated with dread and agony and humiliation, she doubled over, dry-heaving uncontrollably, before she mercifully passed out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catherine Parr fills Anne in on some basic details of this strange new world they've woken up in. Anne is drawn to her in ways she doesn't fully grasp, but Catherine seems to be hiding something.

Anne woke up in what was, apparently, her bed an hour or so later to the sight of Catherine Parr hovering over her anxiously. It took a few moments for everything that had transpired to register again, after which she felt shivery and vaguely nauseous but not overwhelmingly so.

“How are you feeling?” Catherine asked.

Anne flexed her fingers experimentally. “Well,” she said, “I might say I feel as though I woke up in an utterly strange place and what I could swear is a wholly different time, and, over the course of what cannot have been more than an hour, remembered that I had been beheaded, had some bout of ill humor, and at last fainted. Does that seem accurate?” She laughed weakly. “Something seems to be steadily dropping a new way of speaking into my brain—I won’t lie, it’s strange; for example, I’d never used what I’ve just realized is called a _contraction_ before this moment—but I haven’t yet gotten any word that might sum all that up. Have _you?_ ”

Catherine laughed, and seemed to relax. “Well, words were the thing I was best at when I was last alive, but nevertheless I can’t say I know of a word that will sum it up, no.”

_She’s captivating when she lets her guard down,_ the thought came unbidden.

“You seem as though you have a better sense of what’s happened so far than I do. Can you possibly explain anything? I’m very confused.”

“I don’t know too much more than you do. The pattern seems to be that all of Henry’s wives have woken up again in this house—I haven’t actually seen everyone yet, but based on whom I have seen, that’s the only logical conclusion.”

“All of them? How many were there after _me_?”

“There were six all together. You know Catherine of Aragon came before you, and you can probably guess that Jane Seymour came after you—” Catherine stopped when she saw Anne blanch. “I’m so sorry. I seem to have the same bad habit I used to of giving people information without thinking about how it will hit them.”

Anne closed her eyes, waiting for the wave of nausea to pass. “You’re forgiven. For the sake of the story we’ll just pretend I was carried off bodily to Heaven in a flaming chariot.”

“You know,” Catherine quipped, “I really _did,_ and do, admire you, but I fear I’d stop short of comparing you to the Prophet Elijah.”

“The point is understood, but maybe for the sake of my nerves we could indulge a bit of narrative fiction for the next hour or so? In any case, please continue.”

“Very well. Jane died giving birth to a son, Edward. Then there was Anne of Cleves, whom he never really liked and divorced after a few months in order to marry her teenage lady-in-waiting, Katherine Howard. Then—brace yourself—he beh—erm,…killed her on charges of adultery. Then it was my turn, and a few years after _that,_ he died. Edward inherited the throne, controlled by a protector and a regency council, and that is the end of my recollection, since I married once more and died in childbirth shortly afterwards.” As she finished the recitation, Anne noticed, her affect seemed especially flat, and though she never exactly met her eyes, she was now staring _very_ pointedly at the far wall.

_Well, so we all have things we don’t want to face yet._

“And what of…now?”

“Well, we all seem to be turning up here. As I said, I’ve not seen everyone yet, just you and Catherine of Aragon, who helped me move you back in here. Both of us also are experiencing new names for things and ways of speaking slowly oozing into our minds, and at least for me, the process seems to have been triggered when I barked my shin on a chair.”

Anne grimaced. “I pulled a door into my foot. How was I supposed to know they’re so much flimsier now? And, speaking of _now_ , do you have any sense of when and where we are?”

“We’re still in London, and it’s 2016—so nearly five hundred years after we all died. Everyone seems to use a slightly different calendar now, too, by the way, so the date within the year is several days ahead of where we would have reckoned it. As you’ve been experiencing, people here seem to still speak English, but it’s a different English, and not just because there are so many words for things we didn’t have then. This tongue seems to contract small words into each other, pronounce vowels differently, and borrow words from other languages with giddy abandon. Did you shout ‘ouch?’ when you pulled the door into your foot?”

“Yes! And then I was very confused, since I’d never said it before.”

“There is no reason you should have. It’s from a variant of German that’s spoken in a New World colony—now a state, I suppose, those colonies seem to have rebelled quite a while ago—called Pennsylvania, and it seems to have entered the English language sometime in the early-to-mid 1800s.”

Anne found herself giddy in spite of her lightheadedness—this Catherine seemed a kindred spirit of sorts, who was, if anything, even hungrier for knowledge than she was. “How did you learn all this already?”

“I looked it up on the phone that was on the bedside table. I see you have one, too—have you had a chance to try it out yet?”

“I’d meant to, but my neck kept smarting and I really needed to find something to put on it. I was going to come look once I’d found it.” She picked the device up from the table and put her thumb in the small divot at the bottom. The screen lit up, displaying the words, “Don’t Panic.” She looked over at Catherine inquiringly.

“They all say that when you first open them; it seems to be some sort of literary allusion, but it’s good advice anyway, I suppose. Press your thumb again.” She did, and the screen changed, now reading “Your towel is the green one in the bathroom cupboard.”

“Erm, all right; I suppose I _had_ been looking for linen, but…”

“Press one more time.”

Now the screen displayed several colorful pictures, called _icons,_ which opened up different things on the screen when you touched them (Anne could actually understand the relationship between these pictures and the icons she knew from worship—both were kinds of images meant to represent and help one access something far larger than the image itself).

“Someone seems to have set these up with our kinds of questions in mind,” Catherine was continuing. “If you touch the icon that looks like a French hood, for example, it will pull up an index that will tell you all about how clothing has changed since we were last alive. The quill will tell you about language and literature, the map will tell you about geography, the crown will tell you about politics—by the way, there’s still a Monarch, a Queen regnant, in fact, but her role is mostly ceremonial now—the loaf of bread will tell you about food, and so on.”

Anne was torn between wanting to dive in right away and wanting to keep talking to Catherine; since the screen was glowing in a way that made her eyes hurt if she stared at it for too long, she decided on the latter. “Thank you for helping me. And for talking—you’ve got so many interesting things to say, and—” She realized, feeling embarrassed for some reason she didn’t quite understand, that she’d been about to add “and you’re beautiful,” so she instead finished, weakly, “and I very much like your company.”

Catherine fidgeted with her hands and smiled shyly, briefly peering up at Anne through her lashes before returning her gaze to her knees. “Of course—why wouldn’t I help you? I, er, very much enjoy talking to you too; it’s nice to have someone who’s truly interested in everything I’ve learned.” Then her expression darkened abruptly. “But I think that once we’re all here and more or less adjusted, we’re all going to have to deal with the ways we’ve hurt each other, and once you’ve heard from me you may not like my company so much anymore. I don’t want to put it on you before you’ve got all your bearings, so for now I’ll just say—I’m sorry. More sorry than I can ever express.” She stood up awkwardly. “If you need me, you can find me using the icon that looks like a circle with a little triangle sticking out of the bottom corner; it will show you how to send a message to me or any of the others. But I think I’d better go now.”

She hurried out of the room, leaving Anne sitting there in a mixture of shock, confusion, and several other emotions she couldn’t quite place. She looked down at the phone, which had gone dark again. She pressed the divot. “Don’t Panic,” the screen told her, again.

_That,_ she thought, _is far easier said than done._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm afraid I couldn't resist a passing "Hitchhiker's Guide" reference.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All six queens meet up for the first time in this new life. Introductions are made, initial apologies are tendered, names are sorted, and general awkwardness ensues.
> 
> Then, after Anne encourages her to clear her conscience, Cathy drops a bombshell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content note: this chapter just begins to address Thomas Seymour's abuse of Elizabeth, and Cathy's complicity with it, near the end. The next chapter will deal with it in more detail.

Eventually, everyone woke up, stubbed or bumped or barked some body part on some inconvenient piece of furniture, oriented themselves minimally, and stumbled down into what seemed like a common area, where they regarded each other in varying states of confusion.

“I suppose,” a muscular woman with short black hair and dark brown skin who seemed to radiate calm ventured after several long moments, “we could begin by introducing ourselves. I’m Anna von Kleve—that would be Anne of Cleves to you—and I was, for a few months, the fourth wife of Henry VIII.” Her contralto voice, Anne thought, was somehow bright and soothing at once, and she suspected Cleves was likely to find herself playing the role of peacemaker perhaps more than she had bargained for.

On the other hand, she also thought the woman likely didn’t suffer fools easily.

A tall, imposing woman with lighter brown skin and dark, coily, chin-length hair sighed. “I am Catherine of Aragon—Catalina de Aragon, if we are giving our names in our mother tongues—and I am Henry's first wife and the true Queen of England, thank you.” Aragon, reincarnated, looked vastly different than the short, matronly, pale-skinned strawberry blonde Anne remembered from court, but there was no doubt that she’d retained her characteristic fortitude. Her voice was deep and resonant—not as deep as Cleves’, but it was commanding as it had ever been. She glared around the room, but then her eyes softened. “I cannot say I’m pleased to see how many wives followed me, but then again, the whole realization has caused me to revise my estimate of where to lay the blame for my situation.”

Anne swallowed. “I suppose that’s my cue. Anne Boleyn—the temptress, et cetera, et cetera, and eventually the headless. Wife number two—and Catherine, I am sorry. You didn’t deserve the way you were treated, and your daughter _certainly_ did not deserve the way I treated her. While my family pressed me towards Henry’s bed with little care for what _I_ might have wanted, there is nevertheless a point past which I still must take responsibility for my own decisions.”

Catherine of Aragon nodded back regally. “Thank you. It is appreciated.”

“Well, if we are going in order, I believe it is my turn,” said an appealingly plump woman with long blonde hair and skin even paler than Anne’s in a surprisingly strong, warm mezzo-soprano. “I am Jane Seymour, the third wife. I gave birth to a son, and died shortly afterward. And if we are offering apologies—Anne, while I do not believe there was much love lost between us by the end, it was nevertheless not my wish that you should be killed, even though if I am honest with myself I knew it was a strong possibility.”

“Much appreciated, thank you.” Jane, Anne thought, seemed much less retiring than she’d been as her Lady in Waiting, but then again, who knew what she’d been hiding? Everyone at court, of necessity, hid a great deal.

“Number four, and you’ve heard from me already,” Anne of Cleves (Anna?) commented. “Kitty, we’ve come to you…”

The slender, lightly tanned woman Anne of Cleves turned toward as she spoke looked a bit younger than the others. She was still shaking slightly as she fidgeted with the ends of her long, dark hair, and Anne stifled a gasp as she saw a scar like her own—but thicker and more jagged—around her neck. _She must not have been lucky enough for a swordsman, poor girl._ “I am Katherine Howard, although my friends have always called me Kitty. I was Henry’s fifth wife, and I was…b..beheaded, and I’d very much prefer not to talk about that anymore!” she finished in a rush. Anne of Cleves reached a comforting hand out to her, but she shrank away.

_Howard?_ Anne thought. _That makes her a cousin, and it seems like we have some other things in common, too. I’ll have to speak to her._ Her voice—also a mezzo-soprano, higher than Jane’s— was perhaps the loveliest yet, sweet and agile and powerful all at once, and it was jarring to hear so much fear and bitterness spoken in such gorgeous tones.

Catherine Parr, as Anne had now learned was her habit, forged steadily onwards; as she did so Anne, despite their earlier awkwardness, still couldn’t help but stare at her, drinking in the low mezzo-soprano that was smokier and huskier in timbre than Katherine’s or Jane’s and softer than Aragon’s. “Catherine Parr, the sixth and final wife, and a writer. After Henry died, Edward was crowned, I married Jane’s brother, and died bearing his child. And,” she glanced at Anne uncomfortably, “while I also have some apologies to make, I think it best if I do so on an individual basis first.”

That cryptic announcement sent the room back into several more minutes of uncomfortable silence, which Anne, fidgeting, finally broke.

“Perhaps this is minor, but it seems to me as though three Catherines and two Annes could become confusing very quickly. What shall we call one another?”

Anne of Cleves shrugged. “I’d prefer ‘Anna’ to ‘Anne’ anyhow, if that suits.”

“Well, if we are reverting to our mother tongues, I would be happy to be ‘Catalina.’”

“I’ve been researching diminutives,” Parr offered, “and I think I’d like to try ‘Cathy.’”

Howard piped up: “I’ve already said my friends called me Kitty, so I want to continue with that.”

Anne had been hoping the inquiry would generate more conversation, but that seemed to settle matters, and the six of them fell back into an uncomfortable silence. They’d all been admirably quick to tender initial apologies, but she knew they weren’t going to smooth over everything that had transpired between them that easily. The air between them was fairly buzzing with a dissonant hum of anxiety, curiosity, resentment, confusion, guilt, and—yes, she was becoming more and more sure of it—attraction, and it was all making her want to claw her skin off, especially that damnable scar.

_No. You’ve just come back to life, for goodness’ sake. It would hardly do to invite in some miasma and succumb to the sweat or worse._ She dug her nails into the ridiculously soft arms of the chair she was sitting in and ground her teeth instead.

She stole another glance at Cathy and saw that she wasn’t the only one holding herself back from breaking something—be it skin, objects, or worst of all decorum—by might and main. Cathy’s lips were moving ever so slightly, and she was working so hard to remain still and erect in her chair she was actually vibrating.

That decided her. “Cathy?” The other woman squeaked and jumped. “You say you have something to confess to me in private? Frankly, whatever you have to apologize to me for can’t possibly be worse than this infernal silence, and the sooner we have it out the sooner we can do whatever it may take to mend it. Is there a place you’d prefer to go to discuss matters?”

___

Anne followed Cathy to the room she assumed she must have woken up in. Once inside, Cathy gestured to the desk chair. “Please, sit.” Anne complied, and Cathy paced over to the window. She stared outside blankly for several long moments.

“Come, now,” Anne encouraged, “it can’t be as bad as all that.”

“My last husband harassed and groped Elizabeth when she was our ward after Henry died,” Cathy replied, bluntly, and the bottom dropped out of Anne’s stomach. “And to my everlasting shame, I was complicit.”

Anne could only stare blankly, mouth agape.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathy tells Anne what Thomas did to Elizabeth, and about her own complicity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's rough, folks. CN for matter-of-fact descriptions of grooming, harassment, groping of a young teenager, as well as more scratching and skin picking.
> 
> I've tried to strike a balance between not excusing Cathy while still allowing her to take responsibility and eventually redeem herself, but I'm not sure I've achieved it, so my apologies to the extent I haven't.

“My last husband harassed and groped Elizabeth when she was our ward after Henry died, and to my everlasting shame, I was complicit.”

Anne found herself unable to process what Cathy had just told her. She hadn’t even allowed herself—really, hadn’t yet had the opportunity—to examine her memories of her daughter, who had been a child of three when she’d been arrested. Just the thought of the girl’s copper hair, let alone the way her powerful mind had already begun to show itself, made her throat close up. And now this? Perversely, her shock and anger were mixed with relief—now, at least, she knew for sure her daughter had survived Henry’s murderous whims. Nor was it unlikely, sad to say, that such things would befall a young woman in the household of a powerful lord. She herself knew that all too well.

But this was too much.

Cathy was still speaking. “She was fourteen then. I learned later he had eyes on her from the moment Henry died, that in fact he had made a suit to her before marrying me. In retrospect, it’s obvious that he loved power far more than he ever loved me. At the time, though—and let me be clear, anything I say about my own state of mind or reasoning is by way of explanation and _not_ of excuse—I was in deep denial. I’d loved him so much before Henry chose me, and after I learned I hadn’t been made regent for Edward as I’d hoped, all I wanted to do was just pick up where I’d left off and not have to…intrigue and second guess my husband. I just wanted to be able to trust him. I was…so tired.

“I didn’t even register the first things he started doing—the bawdy jokes, the winks, the looks. It wasn’t that different from court flattery, after all. And I’d always been attracted to his roguishness and boundary-pushing. Still, when he escalated to touching her, in the guise of tickling and horseplay, I knew in my heart something was wrong—I just didn’t want to believe it. I _couldn’t_ believe it. It would mean having to start over _again._ ”

Anne had a sickening sense of where the story might go from here, and she could feel herself beginning to shake with anger, but what Cathy said next was worse than she had imagined.

_“_ And so…” Cathy took a deep, shuddering breath. “I joined him—twice when he tickled her, and once when he caught her in the garden I held her while he slashed at her dress with a sword. I somehow convinced myself that if I were there and playing along, it really would stay a game and nothing else. I thought maybe I could keep it from getting worse. I was very, very wrong.”

A red haze clouded Anne’s field of vision. And yet Cathy was _still talking._ How could she be saying this so calmly? Why wasn’t she on her knees, begging for mercy? Instead, she _kept going—_

“One day I walked in on him embracing and kissing her. I was furious. I knew I had to separate them, I knew she was in danger. But I was pregnant by then, I’d hurt my wrist on top of it, and I was so, so tired, I could barely function. I couldn’t turn him out, even though it was glaringly obvious he was at fault. So…I sent her away. I’d meant to explain everything to her after the baby came, to apologize for not seeing it sooner, for joining _in_ on all of it. Just then, I couldn’t manage to string anything together. I was sick at the thought of what I’d done, terrified of the birth, terrified of what it would mean if I were to leave him, even assuming I could. And then, well, I died. Knowing my death would leave him free to go after her again. I think I may have told him how horrid his actions were, in my fever, but I can’t remember for certain.” She sighed. “That’s everything I know. I’m very well aware that no apology is sufficient, but for the little it is worth, you have mine. You can ask me any questions you like, and I will answer them honestly to the best of my ability.”

Cathy turned toward Anne, and, slowly, locked eyes with her—something that in any other circumstance Anne would have noticed was immensely difficult and uncomfortable for her, were she not currently flooded with white-hot rage. “I admired you, Anne, in our last life, and I like and admire you now to an extent that frankly scares me. I loved and admired Elizabeth. I will never forgive _myself_ for hurting her and failing her, and it would be absurd for me to ask _your_ forgiveness for it. And although it will pain me deeply, I will also fully understand if, now that you know this, you never want to see me again.”

Anne was in no place to hear Cathy out any further. She leaped to her feet, possessed with fury. “You…you bitch!” she shouted, not allowing the other woman to escape her gaze and taking grim pleasure in her obvious discomfort. “You opportunistic predator! You recite this so calmly, as if it were something you were reading from one of your precious books! Can’t you _feel_ anything?!”

“Do you _want_ me to fall apart?” Cathy asked in a near-whisper. “You deserve the whole truth. If I allowed myself to feel what this meant, I assure you, I’d barely be able to get a word of it out. And anyway, I didn’t want you to think _you_ somehow needed to attend to my pain.”

“You think I give a rat’s cock about you and your supposed pain?!” Anne drew her dignity around her like a cloak, standing as tall as she could. “You are most correct about one thing, Catherine Parr,” she said, coldly, glaring daggers at the woman. “I will never, _ever_ forgive you.” She turned on her heel and swept out the door.

Once she’d strode several paces down the hall she stopped, snarling and weeping at once, and without thinking drove her fist into the wall. It deformed far more easily than she’d expected, crumbling and giving off a spray of whitish powder, but when she withdrew her hand from the indentation, she saw that her knuckles were nevertheless scraped and bleeding.

She found she didn’t care.

She was still raging when she reached her own room, but if she were honest with herself, it wasn’t all at Cathy. At the back of her righteous fury, stoking it but also turning it inward, was the memory of another red-haired teenager who ached for her lost mother, and whom Anne herself had tormented. And if she were truly, truly honest with herself—a place she couldn’t go right now but where she knew, with sickening clarity, she’d have to go eventually—the reason she’d scorned the girl and even threatened her life was because she was desperate to preserve her own position.

Which wasn’t all that different from what Cathy had just confessed to. Was it?

The white powder she’d sent flying when she’d punched the wall was making her itch. Her neck itched too. She’d broken the skin on her neck, and now on her hand, she’d learned her new friend had participated in her husband’s abuse of Elizabeth— _oh, my imp, my child, I wish I could have been there to protect you!—_ and her conscience was choosing this moment to remind her that she’d bullied Mary for many of the same reasons.

_So maybe I’ll get the sweat. So what?_ She tore into the itching skin with her nails, and she could have sobbed with relief.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the queens catch up on twenty-first century hygiene practices, Kitty opens up to Anne about her past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another CN: Kitty talks about her abuse at the hands of Mannox and Dereham.

To her mixed relief and disappointment, Anne did not succumb to the sweating sickness, or the black death, or smallpox. She purloined petroleum jelly and tape and gauze from the medicine cabinet and bound up her scratched arm and neck as best she could; nevertheless some of the scratches became inflamed and sore. Fortunately, whomever had laid in clothing for her had been thoughtful enough to lay in several turtlenecks, so for a while she was able to escape notice.

In any case, neither her skin nor her conflict with Cathy were among the most immediate problems the six women had to deal with in those first weeks. There were many more practical issues that required immediate attention. For many of these, the answers came quickly enough. They learned how to use the oven, range, sink, and microwave in the kitchen, and to prepare simple meals. Jane proved most adept here—both at the cooking itself and at learning the mechanics of the devices on which it was done. (In fact, Jane had figured out how to fix several small items around the house with surprising ease). With some fumbling, and again with Jane’s mechanical instincts, they figured out how to clean and dry their clothing in the strange machines in the basement.

Other problems appeared several days later. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they began to sniff them out several days later.

“Er, ladies?” Anna spoke up one morning. “I hate to be rude, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that there’s not much of a supply of linen underthings and rubbing cloths around here, and, frankly, we’re all starting to smell awful. Clearly, they do hygiene a bit differently these days, and it might be worth learning about that.” She wrinkled her nose. “Preferably _soon._ ”

No one needed to sniff herself to confirm that; Anna had stated the painfully obvious. They all began searching their phones for the relevant information. Kitty at last piped up: “I think it’s the pitcher and basin icon. It says…it looks like the built-in basin in the bathroom, the shower, if you turn a series of knobs, warm water will rain down. You’re supposed to get naked”—she flinched a bit— “and stand under it, and then you lather up and the water rinses it off. And then you dry off with the towel—remember how the second things the phones told us was where those were? I guess that’s why.”

“Won’t that open up the pores, though?” Jane asked. “We’ll all get sick!”

Catalina, who clearly had been looking elsewhere, answered. “I’ve just been reading about medicine—that’s the urine flask icon—and, well, looks like we have a lot to catch up on. Suffice it to say, though, that they’ve figured out that that generally isn’t how people get sick.”

Cathy and Anne both perked up immediately. “Oh? What have people learned?” they said in unison, reflexively smiling at each other before they came to their senses and turned away, grimacing. Kitty looked eager, too, and Catalina was about to continue enlightening everyone, when Anna interrupted.

“You lot can all nerd out _later._ Right now we are all going to get ourselves clean, because I can’t take this _miasma_ for another second. There are three bathrooms in this house, and I assume we were all used to bathing with attendants, so if we need help figuring anything out—well, there’s nothing any of us haven’t seen before. I’m starting off in the first floor one—Parr, how about you come with me?” Cathy nodded, clearly relieved that she’d been spared another confrontation with Anne. “Good. The rest of you sort it out. GO.” She and Cathy stalked off.

Anne glanced over at Kitty, who’d shrunk back into herself. “Kitty, would you like to come with me? I won’t touch you unless you ask, and I promise I won’t ask you about anything you don’t bring up yourself, if you’ll do the same for me. Fair?” At Kitty’s nod, she stood up. “Let’s go take the one on the second floor.”

___

Kitty had asked if she could shower by herself so Anne couldn't see her, so after they’d figured out how to turn the water on, Anne turned her back while Kitty stripped to the skin, stepped into the tub, and drew the curtain. She sat down on the closed toilet lid, wincing as she got a good whiff of herself. She really did smell dreadful, and she hoped Kitty wouldn’t take too long.

"Anne?” came the younger woman’s voice from behind the shower curtain.

_Oh, well._ She stifled a groan. “Yes, Kitty?”

“Can I ask you a question about…you know, the thing we have in common? You can say no.”

“I assume by ‘the thing we have in common’ you _don’t_ mean utter pricks for fathers or an undying disdain for the men of the house of Howard?”

“…n-no. You _know_ what I mean. Please don’t make me say it.”

“I’m sorry, Kit. Why don’t you ask, and I’ll see if I feel like answering?”

“Did you…actually do any of what they accused you of?”

_Ouch._

Anne tried to cover her startlement with a laugh. “You don’t faff around, do you? And no,” she said with more rancor than she’d intended, “I did _not_ fuck my brother. Or any of the other men in question. I flirted with one of them. One of them who was _not_ my brother. Once. Within accepted courtly protocols.”

“I’m sorry! I’m—” Anne heard a gulp and a sob. “I’m asking because…I did what they said I did. I let other people have me before I met the King, and I hid it. I…probably deserved what I got, and it’s awful, but there was a little part of me that was hoping I wasn’t the only one here who wasn’t blameless.” She went quiet, but Anne heard her slump against the shower wall, and then the occasional shuddering whimper.

“Oh, Kitty. My darling, no, that—that isn’t what I meant, don’t you dare say that about yourself.” No answer. “Listen, I respect that you want to be alone in there, but I’m worried you’re going to fall and hurt yourself. Can I come in if I don’t look?” Still no answer. “Kitty, I’m sorry, but I’m stripping down and coming in. I promise I won’t hurt you.” She shimmied out of her clothes, calling once more, “all right, Kitty, I’m coming in now,” before gently pushing aside the curtain and stepping into the tub.

A wave of steam fogged her eyes and made her cough, and she took advantage of the moment turned her head away as she’d promised, but not before she saw that Kitty was sitting on the floor of the tub, curled into a ball. She sighed.

“Kitten. Can you at least tell me that you aren’t hurt and that you can breathe properly?” She saw the top of Kitty’s head bob a little, out of the corner of her eye. “All right. Now the first thing I think I am probably more qualified than anyone to tell you is that Henry _liked killing people._ Regardless of what they may or may not have deserved. His court was a death trap, and that wasn’t your fault. Do you understand me?”

No response. “Well, we’ll work on that. The second thing I’m going to do is tell you some things I’ve noticed about you, and you can tell me to stop at any point. All right?”

Another small head bob. “I’ve noticed you flinch away when anyone touches you, even by accident. I’ve also noticed that there are certain small, apparently trivial things that make you turn white as a sheet, like when our phones make noises that sound like lutes, or when Jane wanted to bring some lavender from the front garden into the house—as soon as you smelled it you left the room as quickly as you could. Now, having some personal experience of That Thing We’re Not Talking About, I think it’s unlikely that lutes and lavender were present then. So I wonder if there’s something else in your past that was very, very unpleasant for you, maybe that was more connected to those little things that set you off? And I wonder if that something was what you got blamed and…well, so on and so forth for? Because if that’s the case, seeing how you react to those things, I would guess it wasn’t something you chose for yourself.”

Minutes passed in silence, until Kitty finally spoke. “They scented the rushes on the floor of the maiden’s chamber in my step-grandmother’s house with lavender. And every time he—Dereham—came in to…see me, he’d step on it and send the smell wafting into the air.”

“Oh, Kitty. How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

_Just like Elizabeth…_ Anne forced her anger back down. “And the lute?”

“When Henry Mannox and I started…meddling with each other, he was playing the lute while I played the virginals. That was before. I was thirteen then.”

“Kitty. You didn’t deserve any of that. Or anything that was done to you because of it.”

“You don’t understand,” Kitty wailed. “I wanted it! I wanted to be liked, and admired, and I wanted _someone_ between my legs so badly it hurt sometimes!”

“But did you want _them_? _Then_? Could you have safely told them ‘no?’”

“What does that matter?”

“Kitten, that’s _all_ that matters.”

Kitty sniffed. “Where did you get _that_ idea from?”

“Come on, love. We had some idea of what it meant to be forced, even then. Even if the law and the written records didn’t acknowledge what happened to you as being forced, those of us who had to watch our backs—women, of course, and more than a few men, too—knew that the law didn’t account for everything. Even the Scriptures have a better sense of things in places. And besides, it’s not like I haven’t done any reading since waking up. I’ve—” she paused—“had some…reasons…to read about exactly the sort of thing you’re describing. And everything I’ve read says it’s all about having power over people, not about wanting to have pleasure.”

Kitty sniffled again, but she made to stand up. Anne kept her eyes carefully averted. “Are you about done cleaning up? I smell horrifying and I’d really like to fix that. If you want to stay in here, I’ll keep looking away—but do you think you could pass me the soap?”

As she scrubbed, wincing at the sting of the soap on her inflamed scratches, she thought about what she’d just told Kitty. _I was under Henry’s power, and I lashed out at Mary. Cathy was under Thomas’s power, and she put her head down and went with the flow when he molested Elizabeth. We both hurt girls not too much older than Kitty was because of it, and there’s no excuse for that. But can I atone a little by helping Kitty now? And if I can, should I give Cathy the chance to atone, too?_

She wasn’t ready to entertain that yet, but the possibility seemed less remote than it had.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author infodumps on basic germ theory while using Cathy as an author avatar in order to go on etymological tangents, and in which Jane is our source of today's angst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is, you might say, TOPICAL and RELEVANT.
> 
> Thus, a PSA: if you are able, WEAR A FUCKING MASK. WASH YOUR HANDS. STAY IN WHERE YOU CAN.
> 
> Or else the queens will come and haunt you, especially Cathy and Jane, neither of whom will ever get over learning that they might have lived if only their birth attendants had WASHED THEIR DAMN HANDS.

The queens felt cleaner than they had since waking up, and if they were, out of habit, anxious on account of their freshly opened pores, and if Anne still felt vaguely itchy and restless, at least the lot of them were far less malodorous. As they reconvened in the common area—the _living room,_ rather, Cathy asked if Catalina could _now_ fill them in on what she’d learned about medicine in the twenty-first century.

“Well,” Catalina began, “There are, I think, two critically important points to start out with. First, the idea of humors and hot/cold and wet/dry constitutions seem to have been based in a fundamentally inaccurate account of physiology. The second is that we now know for sure what causes infectious disease. It isn’t miasmas or evil humors, although our physicians weren’t completely off-base with the miasma theory; they were right that some diseases can travel through the air—or at least, on invisible droplets of fluid that travel through the air. Infectious diseases like plague or smallpox or grippe or the great pox are caused, apparently, by all sorts of infinitesimal creatures called _bacteria_ and _viruses—germs,_ collectively—that seem to attack the body’s different systems. Sort of how fleas and lice and such feed on people and animals, but on a much smaller level. And, incidentally, fleas and such spread some of these germs, like what caused the Black Death. Other kinds, like grippe, are spread through the air. Some travel through blood or semen, like the great pox, or by skin-to-skin contact like fever blisters, or through bad food—if you’ve ever had a flux after eating, it was probably caused by one of several kinds of germs.”

“How do you stop these germs from making you sick or killing you?” Kitty asked with undisguised interest.

“Well, it depends. There are some kinds of germs we still don’t have ways to kill once they’re in your body. Others, there are drugs that can kill specific types of germs, or broad groups of them. It seems bacteria—so that includes what causes Black Death, or the Great Pox, or scarlet fever, or some kinds of flux from bad food—can often be killed with a kind of blunt instrument, one from among a class of drugs called _antibiotics_. Viruses—like what causes smallpox, or the grippe—are often harder to kill and can require more specialized drugs. It’s usually better to prevent those, if you can, by injecting a weaker or killed version of the virus so your body learns to recognize it and fight it off. That’s called a _vaccine_ —”

“Wait,” Cathy interrupted, “ _vaccine?_ From _vaca?_ What do cows have to do with this?”

“Apparently the fellow who developed the modern version of the procedure used cowpox to prevent smallpox. Anyway, germs are always changing—that’s related to something called _evolution_ that I think we should all probably save for another day, because I get the sense that that’s going to fundamentally throw our whole worldview into question—but the relevant bit for now is that doctors and natural philosophers, who are called _scientists_ now”—

“That name seems vaguer to me,” Cathy broke in, “since _scientia_ means ‘knowledge,’ so a ‘scientist’ is just a ‘person who knows things…’”

_Damnation,_ Anne thought, _why must she be so compelling when I’m still furious with her?_

“I agree, Cathy,” replied Catalina, “but right now that’s beside the point. Anyway, scientists have to keep tweaking the drugs and to a much lesser extent the vaccines because the germs keep changing and ‘learning’ how to survive. So in many cases it’s better to prevent infection. It seems we’re going to have to find physicians soon and get caught up on a whole lot of vaccines, and I’ll admit I am not looking forward to explaining why we don’t have any of them…”

“Are there any other ways to keep from getting infections?” Anne asked, her smarting neck suddenly making the question urgent.

“Wash your hands. With soap and _warm_ water, which I know will take some getting used to. Wash any wounds with soap and warm water. Apparently strong— _very_ strong—spirits can also kill germs on surfaces, including the skin. I think that’s what the bottles labeled _isopropyl alcohol_ in the bathrooms must be for.”

“So opening up the pores or breaking the skin _won’t_ be like leaving the door open to the sweat or anything like?”

“Pores are fine. Wounds are at risk of infection, but as long as you clean them well and cover them until they’ve healed, there’s no need to panic about them, especially not superficial ones. The only reason to worry is if swelling or pain seems to expand well past where the actual wound is or go deeper than the outer layer of skin.” Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice Anne’s sharp intake of breath.

“So…” Anna considered this for a minute. “Humor me. The oldest _any_ of us lived to be was fifty. I don’t imagine this would have fixed—Kitty, cover your ears—a bad case of blade to the neck, but for the rest of us—would any of us have lived longer if we’d known about germs?”

Catalina’s face took on a pained expression. “You and me, no, I’m afraid,” she said to Anna. “There seem to be _other_ parts of modern medicine that may have helped us, depending on the circumstances, but you and I both probably had kinds of cancer, which seems to happen when the little building blocks that make up our bodies—they’re called _cells_ — grow out of control. Sometimes that can be a secondary consequence of certain kinds of cell damage caused by viruses, but other times we just don’t know yet.”

“Damn it.” Anna studied her fingernails.

“Jane and Cathy, on the other hand, might have made it,” Catalina added. “Childbirth involves several opportunities to introduce massive doses of germs straight into the blood and vital tissues, and it also involves people putting their—in our day, improperly washed—hands directly into potential infection sites. It seems like once people started widely accepting germ theory and birth attendants started following basic sanitation procedures, deaths from childbed fever got _much_ rarer. Mind you,” she added, “there are still plenty of other ways to die in childbirth. You can wash your hands as long as you please, and it still won’t make a baby’s head fit through a pelvis that’s too small for it. But handwashing is one major way to help.”

Cathy looked slightly green, and she was breathing rapidly. At that moment Anne couldn’t have cared less about her anger; she wanted to go to her and hold her. But before she could, there was an outburst from the one person in the room who hadn’t yet spoken that stopped them all cold.

“No!”

Everyone turned to stare at Jane—gentle, ladylike Jane—who was shaking and red-faced.

“No,” Jane repeated. “I can’t…I can’t accept that.”

“Jane, _mi amor,_ ” Catalina said, concern etched on her face, “what do you mean?”

“What I said. I can’t accept that. I can’t accept that I would have survived if we’d done something that simple.”

“Why the _hell_ not?” Cathy, still a bit green and unsteady, asked her bluntly. “I’m _thrilled_ no one else needs to die like I did. It was _torture._ ”

“Because then it meant _nothing!_ ” Jane shouted, startling the rest of them. “Nothing! I died, an infant was left motherless, and HE was free to destroy more women, because of some tiny little creatures nobody can see? That’s _it?!_ ”

She stopped for a moment, clearly trying to steady her breathing. “If this is true,” she continued, “it means I didn’t die as some kind of noble sacrifice, in the line of duty to my kingdom.” Her voice, which she’d imposed some temporary control over, rose dangerously again. “If this is true—it means I died because _no one understood that they needed to wash their_ thrice-bedamned HANDS!” Her face crumpled, and she buried it in her hands as first Catalina and then the rest rushed to her.

Anne rushed in with everyone else. Yet after the initial flood of Jane’s tears had calmed, she couldn’t focus on anything but the revelation that she’d feared for nothing all along. _Breaking the skin or opening the pores won’t put me at direct risk of plague, after all? I can do something about all this infernal itching?_

There was nothing to stop her from clearing the _gunk_ from her skin’s pores.

And if she hadn’t been studiously avoiding Cathy, she might have guessed from her expression that something similar was going through _her_ mind.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As her skin-picking begins to get out of control, Anne struggles to hide it from the others. As it turns out, however, she isn't alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: *slightly* more graphic depictions of skin picking than previous chapters.

Anne had thought she’d waited long enough to sneak into the bathroom and minister to her back, chest, and shoulders without interruption—heaven knew they needed the attention.

She’d initially been thrilled to discover that she could address the nagging irritation under her skin without deadly consequence, but as the weeks had gone by she’d come to the realization that she’d gotten herself into a far more frustrating cycle than she’d anticipated. What started as a scratch here or a squeezed pore there had snowballed into a perpetual round of infected scabs that irritated the skin around them, causing more blackheads and impacted pores that then seemed to demand their own excoriation.

She’d even come to miss the flat-chestedness of her old body, for it meant that—unlike, say, Kitty—she couldn’t really get away without wearing the new foundation garments ( _bras_ ), which dug irritatingly into her ribcage and always seemed to leave a ring of small, angry bumps where sweat collected under the band. Those, in turn, she couldn’t resist clawing open, which just made the bras all the more uncomfortable.

_Who would have thought I’d be nostalgic for bodices and stomachers, of all the things? Yet here we are. They may have been stiff, but at least they didn’t gouge like this._

She’d managed to hide the issue from anyone’s view and, therefore, anyone’s concern. True, her neck still presented a problem, but everyone had seemed to chalk that up to perfectly acceptable post-beheading stress behavior— _I’ll bet that’s a_ highly _uncommon symptom; Kitty and I should feel very rare and special indeed—_ and hadn’t seemed to connect it to anything else. The lesions on her chest, back, and shoulders, meanwhile, were easily hidden by clothing, so long as she took care to avoid pale colors that would show blood spots. And since, after figuring out how the showers worked, they’d all decided they preferred to bathe alone, that was no longer an avenue for detection, either.

Really, the main problem had been figuring out what to do when the urge to scratch and pick threatened to overcome her outside the privacy of her room or the bathroom. As they all adjusted to their new reality, they’d all seen various personality quirks emerge in one another, and Anne was quickly gaining a reputation as a chaotic, puckish sort, prone to off-color jokes, pranks, and odd behaviors. This wasn’t wrong, exactly—as had been the case in her last life, Anne truly was possessed of a quick temper, a quicker wit, a short attention span, and a love of risk and mischief—but it was also the case that playing the reputation up to its fullest proved useful for covering a range of lapses, whether it be losing items, forgetting requests, making ill-considered quips or, most crucially at the moment, sneaking off into a corner in an attempt to relieve some spot of intolerable itching or pressure just under her skin.

Just that evening, for example, while they were watching some sort of performance on the large screen in the living room called the _television_ , Anne felt an inflamed spot on her left shoulder rub painfully against the strap of her bra. Unfortunately, she was seated right next to Anna on the sofa (Anna, who was wearing a tank top; Anne was close enough to notice how infuriatingly smooth and unmarred the skin was on _her_ perfect fucking shoulders.) She rather doubted she could relieve the pressure without her noticing and either being disgusted or worried; she wasn’t sure which would be worse.

Trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, Anne crept off to the darkened kitchen, where she flattened herself into a corner and turned on one of the under-cabinet lights before pulling aside the neck of her t-shirt and her bra strap and craning her neck to try and get a look at the offending bit of skin. No luck. She felt the raised and slightly warm bump, but just as she was about to try to squeeze it she heard footsteps and hastily pulled her shirt back into place before whirling around to face Catalina.

“Anne? What on earth are you doing in here?” Catalina’s expression couldn’t seem to decide whether it was concerned or suspicious.

“I was…checking on the pepper stash!” Anne prevaricated hastily. (It wasn’t as absurd as it sounded; helpful as the phones were, there were still several things about the twenty-first century it was proving difficult for the queens to wrap their minds around, and one of these things was the absurdly low price of things like pepper. In fact, during their first expedition to the grocery store they’d been so flabbergasted that the spices were just…out there…on open shelves for the taking that Catalina had actually demanded to know whether the unfortunate clerk who’d been stocking the aisle understood that these things were so valuable that kingdoms had started _wars_ over them, and what was he thinking not locking them away? They were all still slightly convinced that this easy availability was a fluke or a mistake, and so Jane had insisted that they buy a significant quantity of black peppercorns to store against potential future need. It now sat at the far back of one of the cabinets, and each of the queens had been known to anxiously check to ensure its safety every now and then).

Catalina didn’t look fully convinced, but since she and Jane were the queens most concerned about protecting the spices, she let it go. Unfortunately, the encounter meant that her shoulder went unrelieved, which was why she was now sneaking into the bathroom in the dead of night with a sewing needle she’d pilfered from Jane. She could have stayed in her room, she supposed, but she thought it probably wouldn’t escape notice if entire bags of cotton wool and isopropyl alcohol went missing, and she was making at least a token attempt to keep things reasonably sanitary. Also, the light in the bathroom was better.

_I wish I’d never started this whole thing,_ she thought irritably, _but I don’t know how else I was supposed to make the itching stop, and it’s not something I could explain to any of the others._ Their _skin looks flawless. I mean, I haven’t really seen Cathy’s, but she’s so cool and unreactive_ (Anne knew this wasn’t actually true, but it was the story she was telling herself) _I can’t imagine this sort of thing would get to her._

She was absorbed enough by this rumination that she didn’t register that the bathroom light was on and the door was ajar. So when she entered the room she was startled to see Cathy in front of the mirror, shift down around one shoulder, exposing several scabs, scratches, and inflamed lesions.

Cathy whirled around and yanked her shift back over her shoulder. “Please, Anne,” she begged. “I know you’re still angry at me and you have every right to be—but can you _please_ not tell the others about this?”

At that point, Anne’s relief at finding an ally and confidante overcame the last of her barriers to beginning to engage with Cathy again. In answer, she pulled her shift down, exposing her own excoriated skin. “I’ll keep your secret if you keep mine,” she said, and felt herself relax as she saw Cathy slump against the sink with relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit to @CynicalRainbows for the idea of the queens having a "pepper stash!"


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Cathy and Anne begin to reconcile, Cathy patches up Anne's shoulder, and Anne has to navigate a different set of confusing sensations.

“So when did it start for you?” Cathy asked, as they sat down on the toilet seat and the rim of the tub, respectively. “I mean, if it’s all right to ask?” She still looked nervous.

Anne was too relieved to care; the pressure of hiding had been building up quite like in any one of the individual impactions she felt compelled to burst. “When I came back, before I even realized what was happening. I touched my neck, my scar felt wrong, and I started reflexively picking at it. When I made it bleed, that kind of snapped me into full awareness, and then I just couldn’t stop noticing other bumps and itches and areas that seemed to need to be…cleared out, I can’t really describe it otherwise.” She studied her hands. “And then once I notice it it’s as though the sensation takes ahold of a part of my mind and worries at it and won’t let me ignore it, like my lapdog Purkoy with a rat.” The thought of the little scamp and his death from falling out a window brought a lump to her throat, which she resolutely suppressed. “It gets to the point where I just can’t pay attention to anything else until I’ve dealt with it. Except it’s never properly dealt with; every time I touch it, that eventually makes it worse.”

Cathy nodded. “That’s not too different from how it is for me. When I came back, there was a feeling in my body that I recognized from before, that someone hadn’t quite tightened all the bolts correctly. When we were alive last, everything we wore was so structured, that helped, mostly, with holding everything together. Now, though, none of the clothes I’ve been provided with are quite right—I’ve tried to research, but I can’t really tell without trying it on, and the shops are just…they’re too much for me, too loud, too bright. So I constantly feel sloppy and itchy and unmoored. And the feeling of even a little dirt or irritation in my pores is so disproportionately strong, it’s overwhelming and almost painful, like my skin is filled with ants. But the little, sharp pain when I scratch or squeeze it—it feels almost good, bracing. It’s like a counter-sensation that cancels out everything else feeling just _wrong_ , as you said, and lets my brain snap into place.”

She’d pulled her knees up to her chin and was holding herself together in a small parcel. “It got so out of hand, though, and now my shoulders look terrible. And I was so sure I was the only one…” She peered sadly at Anne from behind her lashes. “I’m grateful you were willing to talk to me, since I don’t think I’ve earned it. Why did you?”

Anne considered the question for a moment. “Well, several things, I suppose. Most immediately, I’d also thought I was the only one. I felt so hopeless this evening, for example, when I had a spot that was driving me to distraction and at the same time being _right there_ next to Anna’s perfect skin. Just to know I’m not alone, to have someone who gets it and who won’t be utterly disgusted—let’s face it, this can get awfully gross—or alternately blow it out of proportion—that’s…I can’t throw that away.” Cathy favored her with a shy smile, and Anne felt a small jolt of…something…shoot through her.

“I’ve also been thinking a lot about everything you told me over the past several weeks,” she continued. “I realized, painful as it was, that I understood the position you were in more than I cared to admit, because”— she bit her lip—“I also hurt a motherless teenager because I was desperate to hold onto my position. The ways I bullied and tormented Mary, and even threatened her life aren’t any more excusable than your participation in Thomas’s abuse of Elizabeth. In some senses, what I did was worse, because I took more initiative.” She worried at a fingernail (another bad habit she’d developed, although this one was very much a holdover from her last life; in fact, she’d gone to her death with bleeding cuticles). “There’s also the fact that you were honest right away, and, so far as I can tell, you hid nothing. You deserve credit for that, I think; grudgingly enough, I even have to admit that your candor pushed me to go and level with Catalina much sooner than I might have done otherwise.”

She thought about how anxious she’d been when she’d spoken to the older woman, whose regal presence reminded her of just how insecure she’d felt in her office and how fanatical she’d become in her insistence that the grieving, indomitable princess acknowledge her as Queen. How, when she’d confessed that she’d briefly toyed with the idea of trying to have Mary executed, the sick churning of her guts and Catalina’s stricken face made her realize, _This is how Cathy must feel whenever she sees me. I don’t deserve to be forgiven, either._

“The amazing thing was, though,” Anne mused, “that Catalina _forgave_ me. I don’t know why, I don’t even know that she _should_ have, but she did, and she did it right then and there. She said that seeing all of us, and learning what happened to all of us—she said that Kitty’s story especially drove this home—made it very clear to her that Henry was to blame for all of it. Not that we didn’t have moral responsibilities, and other choices we could have made, but that all of our possible choices were poisoned by the fact that one man could never get enough power— one who wasn’t just willing to hurt people to get that, but who actually liked hurting people.” She shook her head. “When we were at court together, I thought her steadfastness and loyalty were signs of foolishness. Now, though? I marvel at the capaciousness of her heart. As Queen I tried to be her opposite, but it seems to me that in fact I would do well to emulate her.”

“Catalina is…a wonder,” Cathy agreed. “She’s my godmother, you know, and although we never really knew each other in our last lives, she’s taken that role seriously ever since we all got our bearings. I actually told her everything right after I told you, and she heard me and let me fall apart with her, and told me she loved me, regardless. She told me what I already knew—that you were under no obligation to forgive me—but that dwelling on what I’d done wouldn’t make any amends for it.”

Anne nodded. “She said something similar to me, about not dwelling, just trying to do better. And there was also one other thing. Despite how angry I was, I just couldn’t get over the fact that…I like you a lot, Cathy. I love how much you know, and how much you want to know; I find your tangents endearing. I think I could very happily listen to you talk for a long time. I like your sense of humor, too—I like how wordy and wry it is.” She winked. “Doesn’t hurt that you’re a Protestant, either. I just—I liked talking to you when we first came back, and I missed it.”

“I…like you a lot too, Anne.” Was Cathy _blushing?_ “I’ve also missed talking to you.”

“Let’s try again, shall we?” Anne chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I can’t honestly say I’ve fully forgiven you yet, or that I’m completely done being angry, but I’m ready to be serious about getting there one day. Can we have a few ground rules, though?”

“Can I hear what they are?”

“I think in some ways they’re variations on the same theme. First, please don’t talk to me about Thomas, at least for now. I’m sure you’ve still got some complicated and painful memories of him; that’s valid. I cannot, however, be the one to help you with them. Hearing his name makes me see red.”

“That’s fair. I’ll do my best.”

“Second, no talking about Elizabeth unless _I_ bring her up. Again, I appreciate that this won’t be easy for you; after all, you knew her longer than I did, and I do know how much you cared for her. It’s for exactly that reason, especially given what happened, that talking about her with you hurts me so much. I didn’t get to be her mother for long at all. I hope we can talk about her one day, but I don’t think that day will come for a long while.”

Cathy looked pained, but agreed. They lapsed into an awkward silence, and eventually Anne became aware once again that the spot on her shoulder she’d come to the bathroom to deal with in the first place was still inflamed and angry. She squirmed; Cathy might be a fellow traveler but she still didn’t want to haphazardly lance the thing in front of her.

As if she’d read her mind, Cathy spoke up just then. ”Listen,” she said. “This is probably overstepping, but I can’t help but notice that the one on your left shoulder looked really bad, and also that you’re holding a sewing needle. I’m nervous about you trying to do that, especially because it’s in an awkward spot that I’m sure is hard to reach. And I’m guessing you didn’t sterilize the needle—mostly because even though I know better, _I_ never bother to do it either, and then it always gets infected. Would you maybe be willing for me to clean the spot and put a band-aid on it or something for you?”

Anne nearly protested that it needed puncturing, not dressing, but if she were honest, she knew that it would just make the lesion larger and more painful. Additionally, she realized, she was oddly reluctant to turn down the opportunity to have Cathy’s hands anywhere on her skin, especially knowing how blemished it was. She wasn’t quite sure how to process that realization, but she wasn’t exactly able to deny it, either.

She finally nodded. “I’d appreciate that, thank you.” She watched as Cathy stood up awkwardly and walked over to the medicine cabinet for supplies, feeling inexplicably anxious. She shifted to make room for her to sit on the rim of the tub behind her, hoping Cathy would ignore her slow flush as she pulled aside her shift.

“You’re shaking,” Cathy commented artlessly.

_Merde._ “Just a bit woozy, I guess?” It was transparently untrue, but Cathy was kind enough to let it go.

The alcohol stung badly enough to make her yelp, but Cathy’s hands were cool and her fingers were nimble, and the combination of the sharp pain and her touch were making Anne feel things she hadn’t felt in a very long time. _Not since I shared a bed with some of the other ladies when I was a Maid of Honour in Henry’s court._ Cathy’s clever hands sent exquisite shocks down her spine and made warmth pool beneath her guts as she dabbed at her shoulder with the stinging cotton wool and then with some sort of salve. Cathy’s breath on the back of her neck was almost too much, and when her hands were suddenly gone Anne barely stifled a wail of disappointment. There was a brief tearing sound, then Cathy’s hands were back—now she _did_ let out a small gasp before she could stop herself—and then it was done, and she felt an exquisite ache at the very center of her.

“All set!” Did Cathy’s voice sound somehow huskier?

“Thank you—that feels much better.” Anne turned herself around to face Cathy. “Can I do the same for you, at all?”

She swore she saw the other woman’s face light up for a moment, then cloud again. “I think I’m all right for the moment. Maybe another time?”

“Of course; consider the offer open.” Anne tried not to seem disappointed. “I suppose we should attempt to sleep.”

“Probably true. But I hope we can talk more tomorrow?”

“I’d really like that.” Anne grinned doltishly in spite of herself, then, flushing and embarrassed, quickly mumbled “um, g’night!” before hurrying back into the hall.

She closed the door of her room behind her, and wondered what the hell she was going to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Now I marvel at the capaciousness of her heart” is a line lifted, with much admiration, from p. 580 of Rachel Hartman’s Shadow Scale.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is nerding out about theology, moral anthropology and the nature of desire. Oh, and kissing. There's also kissing.

To Anne’s delight, she saw a great deal more of Cathy from then on; to her intense frustration neither of them had yet worked up the nerve to confront whatever it was that made them blush and squirm in one another’s presence.

This despite the fact, mind, that they had come to a tacit agreement to patch each other up as needed, so they were touching one another intimately on a regular basis. Every time Anne cleaned and salved an eruption on one of Cathy’s shoulders (shoulders that she was sure, having studied them carefully by now, would fit perfectly in her own hands), she had to resist the urge to caress her honey-colored skin. Every time Cathy cared for her wounds, Anne came closer and closer to feeling as though she might explode at the next pass of Cathy’s fingertips.

It was _torture._ Except that she couldn’t get enough of it.

Worse, in some ways, was listening to that smoky voice of hers as she spoke earnestly about any number of topics—especially Biblical studies, which she’d taken up with wonder and gusto as soon as she’d learned of the ways the field had exploded since she’d last been alive. When she’d realized she could read _women_ Biblical scholars, she’d gone into ecstasies, and soon the shelves in her room filled with titles like _Judges and Method, Sisters in the Wilderness, Battered Love,_ and (the title Anne thought was perhaps the most apt, on multiple levels) _The Beginning of Desire._

“It’s a Jewish commentary on Genesis,” Cathy explained when Anne asked her about that last title one day, her whole face lighting up at the question. “It’s organized by the portion of it that Jews read in synagogue each week—well, they read a portion in sequence each week from the first five books of the Bible, but this book is just on Genesis—so it’s organized into essays of a kind, but the theme that runs through it is about how reading Genesis in the way that she does immerses one in a perpetual cycle of strangeness and familiarity that leaves you always wanting more, to go back and read again the thing you’ve already read and get something new and strange from it. Maybe it will be comforting, maybe it will be tragic or disturbing, but there’s always that possibility—and so the not-knowing and the not-having is what generates the desire for it.”

“‘A perpetual cycle of strangeness and familiarity’ is not a bad description of this whole experience of reincarnation,” Anne mused, staring out Cathy’s window from where she was sitting on the bed. (Actually she was staring out the window quite deliberately so that she wouldn’t stare too much at Cathy). “Though how desire fits into it all is more difficult to figure, at least yet. I don’t quite know enough about this new world to know what I want from it yet.” She turned to Cathy. “What tells you when you want something? Hell, for that matter, how do you know when it’s acceptable to want something for yourself? We all got in a lot of trouble for having been perceived to want the wrong things last time around, or because _he_ wanted something that our basic existence made difficult or impossible. For that matter, _you_ and _I_ each hurt people who didn’t deserve it because we _wanted_ to stay in the positions we were in.”

Cathy, who’d been leaning against her bookshelf, pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Those are two very different questions, there. I think it might be best to start with the last one—how do I know when I’m allowed to want something for myself? Honestly, I don’t know yet, but I have some inconclusive thoughts.” She padded over to the bed. “Mind if I sit here with you?”

“Not at all.” As Cathy settled herself next to her, Anne’s body reminded her in no uncertain terms of at least one thing she wanted desperately.

“So when we were last alive I believed quite strongly that we were all fundamentally and constitutionally sinners in need of God’s grace, and that the character of our desires reflected that. I still do on a deep and basic level, and even if I didn’t already derive it from Scripture, I don’t think it would be difficult to reach that conclusion just based on observing the world around us. I also believe, however, that we have a fundamentally good and admirable desire for relationship with God, and to the extent that our desires are reflections of that basic desire, there’s something about them that is at least acceptable and has the potential to be made holy. The trick is sorting out which parts of a given desire are from sinfulness and which parts are from that holy yearning for connection.”

“Give me an example.”

“Take forgiveness—both wanting to forgive and wanting to be forgiven. Seems straightforward, right? As Christians we’re called to forgive and to seek forgiveness. But to the extent that that desire comes from just not wanting to make waves, or wanting to hold onto something that we fear we’ll lose if we hold someone to account, the desire to forgive can be deeply sinful. When it comes out of genuine recognition that we’re all sinners, or from a genuine desire to be in fellowship with a person while still holding them to account, on the other hand, then I think it’s a desire that reflects our desire for relationship with the Divine. Similarly, wanting to be forgiven at the expense of the person who’s been hurt—that’s sinful; wanting to do the work to earn another person’s forgiveness isn’t.”

The significance of Cathy’s example wasn’t lost on Anne. “Cathy,” she said, quietly. “I’ve seen you doing the work. I’m still not _all_ the way there yet, but I know I will be.”

“Thank you. I won’t ever stop working.” Cathy’s words were a bare whisper. Anne reached out, hesitating as her hand hovered over Cathy’s knee. “May I?” Cathy nodded, and Anne rubbed her knee gently. “I know.”

Cathy sighed and bumped her head against Anne’s shoulder, almost like a cat, then stayed with her head resting there. Anne wasn’t sure if what she felt was lust or affection, or both, nor was she sure whether she was on the brink of melting or exploding. After several long moments sitting like this, during which she was certain Cathy could feel her heart beating wildly, she decided to take a risk.

“Cathy?” she breathed. “What about more immediate desires? What about when I know clearly, if I’m honest with myself, that I want something, because I feel it in my body? When is it right to want that?”

She could feel Cathy tense up against her, but she didn’t pull away, either. There was another silence, and then Cathy said, in a quiet, faraway voice, “I used to think that the body and its desires were base and fundamentally bound up in sinfulness, but I don’t anymore. After coming back, and coming back _into_ a body—and relishing so much the ability to _feel_ things in a body again, I _can’t_ think that. Now? I think the seat of sinfulness is the will to power over others. I think the body, on the other hand, is fundamentally innocent. It’s only perverted when it’s used to harm other bodies and souls.”

“Strangeness and familiarity at once.” Anne squeezed Cathy’s knee a little harder. Cathy didn’t recoil. “So…”

“So if my body is telling me I want something, and your body is telling you the same thing, and no one else would be harmed by our fulfilling those desires…”

“Then…” Anne swallowed hard. “If I wanted to kiss you?”

“I would…like that very much.”

Anne brushed a stray curl from Cathy’s face, and then Cathy’s lips were on hers and Cathy’s hands were grasping at her back and tangled in her hair and nothing had ever felt more _right_ in either of her short and eventful lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The Beginning of Desire" is by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. "Judges and Method" is by Gale Yee, "Sisters in the Wilderness" is by Delores Williams, and "Battered Love" is by Renita Weems. All of them will have insights that would, in one subtle way or another, help Cathy get to the positions she articulates in this chapter.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Anne and Cathy ease into a new relationship, Anne tries to come to terms with her past.
> 
> Brief discussion of Thomas Seymour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter wound up as a natural ending for this particular fic, even though at first I'd anticipated perhaps one or two more.
> 
> I may do a stand-alone smut fic connected to this that picks up some of the themes in this chapter and the previous one, though no promises.
> 
> Thanks to all for reading along, and your comments, which have been delightful!

Even as a girl, Anne had been aware that when she touched certain parts of her body in the right ways it created pleasant sensations. Shortly thereafter, she had learned in no uncertain terms that acting on this knowledge was not acceptable, and so that was that, at least for quite a while.

Then she reached her teens, and she became aware of several more things. First, it suddenly became simultaneously far more difficult not to act on what she knew, and far more critical to maintain the proper behavior and decorum at all times, for she was now very much on the marriage market, and she had her family’s image to uphold. The stakes of this were driven home even more dramatically when questions began to arise about her sister’s virtue.

Second, she learned that, fortunately for her value on the marriage market, men found her alluring and irresistible. This was a mild surprise, for she was aware that her physique—in her first body she’d been boyishly slender, dark-haired, flat-chested, sallow-complected, and weak-chinned—was not precisely fashionable. She had, however, been witty, learned, and daring, and it turned out that men liked a girl who could return their jests, talk about their books and their hunts, and keep up with them at the card table—so long, that is, as she was careful only just to match them, and never to overtake them.

Third, she began to realize that while men found her alluring, the feeling was never mutual. Not that she didn’t enjoy the game. On the contrary—the _attention_ she received from men was alluring, and the rush she got from figuring out how much she could prod at the rules to stay just on the right side of the line between _daring_ and _scandalous_ was like nothing else. But the pleasant sensations she burned to give herself over to hardly ever stirred as a result of her courtly flirtations, and if they did, it was only distantly, tied as much into the rush she felt from the game itself as it was to the game’s objects.

No, the times heat pulsed between her legs and she felt as though her privy parts were doing backflips inside her came later, in the beds she shared with the other women at court, as she strove to stay _still_ and let nothing on, even though she was sure her thoughts and sensations must be written in flames across her skin for all to see. She knew what Saint Paul and the Church fathers had to say about what it meant if she were to act on those feelings—that it would be a sign she’d forsaken God, that it was _para physin_ , contrary to nature, and that such physical disorder was symptomatic of greater spiritual disorder. And she certainly knew how disordered she was in so many other ways—knew it with every flash of temper, every lost object, every jape gone awry. She knew she had a great deal of work to do.

So she strove to study more, read more, anything that could set her spirit to rights, and she strove to satisfy her desires by playing the game she’d been given to play, channeling her body’s naked and aching hunger by night into dazzling, impeccable performances by day.

Her family noticed, and pushed her toward greater prizes, until they propelled her inexorably into the sight, and then towards the bed, of none other than King Henry VIII of England.

Did she want to participate in this tourney? Did it matter? She was in it now, and she was going to win.

(Even if she still felt the familiar heat and spasms, not at the sight of the dashing young king astride his destrier, but at the sight of the ladies cheering him on, that was immaterial now. She had a duty to fulfil, and a point to prove).

Armor donned, destrier mounted, she lowered her visor, and leveled her lance at none other than Queen Catherine of Aragon, the brilliant, iron-spined warrior queen who, heavily pregnant, had roused the blood of the troops at Flodden. As she spurred on toward this most formidable of opponents, she felt the strongest rush yet, and tried to ignore the fact that she felt a bit of her heart die then, too.

(She didn’t want to fight this woman. She didn’t even want the spoils that came from it. But those were the terms of the game, and the game was all she had).

At the end of all of it, when Henry had put Catalina aside for good and promised to marry her, for just a moment she felt as though she were on top of the world. Never mind that she hadn’t agreed to play—she’d entered the riskiest game yet, played patiently and flawlessly, and won the greatest prize she could imagine. Now, perhaps, she could rest on her laurels.

Then she looked down. She realized then that, far from resting on a champion’s couch, she was standing on a rickety log laid over a deep and treacherous ravine, and she’d have to cross more skillfully than she ever had before just to stay alive.

She looked across the ravine, saw how far she had to go, and knew, somewhere deep in her stomach, that she was doomed.

And when Henry finally took her and there was none of the fire she’d felt simply lying next to the other maids of honor and willing herself not to move, she thought it might have been better to give herself over to disorder after all.

To have destroyed another woman for _this_ reward was sure proof, she thought, that despite her efforts to the contrary she’d forsaken God all the same.

____

All of this ran through Anne’s mind over and over during the weeks before she finally kissed Cathy. With every laughing, indirect glance, every touch, every whisper of her smoky voice, the fire that she’d thought put out for good after she’d gone to bed with Henry came back as fiercely as ever.

This was mostly welcome—she’d feared the part of her that knew how to feel _good_ had died long ago—but it was also concerning, for she still remembered the admonitions of St. Paul, of Tertullian, of St. Augustine: that to exchange natural desire for unnatural, to be what Tertullian called a _frictrix_ —a woman who rubbed herself against other women—was a consequence of alienation from God, of fundamental spiritual disorder. And certainly it was clear that her basic _disorder_ had also carried over into this life, even more strongly than before. She still snapped and raged, as the fist-shaped deformation in the wall outside Cathy’s room reminded her every time she passed it. She was still easily distracted, she still spoke out of turn, she still lost things with distressing regularity.

She still sought the thrill of risk, too, and it was this that pushed her past her hesitation to continue seeking the feel of Cathy’s deft and practiced hands, to speak with her of desire, and, at last, to kiss her. And after that, she thought that if someone so theologically astute as Cathy wanted to kiss her back, perhaps there was more to this familiar, strange fire than spiritual disorder after all.

As she had done when she had last been alive, then, she strove to learn more. This time, though, she had so much more to read, so many more perspectives. She could read the voices of women who felt as she did. She could read the voices of women _theologians_ who felt as she did. She could read about what made her body feel what it felt, and what she might do about it.

And best of all, this time she had someone to study with.

_____

“Is this new for you?” she asked Cathy one afternoon as they lay in each other’s arms, books cast aside for the time being in favor of more practical study.

Cathy delicately traced the line of Anne’s collarbone with her index finger. “What do you mean?”

“Wanting other women. Did you feel that then, too? Did you ever feel like this with any of your husbands? I never did; I only felt like this when I looked at the other ladies in the court, although I didn’t know what to do about it. Not that there weren’t rumors about some of the others, sometimes, or particular friendships among them that were just accepted. But I was sure no one else was burning up like I was, and all I knew was that it was a sign something else was badly out of order.”

Cathy opened her mouth, then stopped. “I can’t properly answer that question without breaking one of our ground rules.”

“What?” Anne thought for a moment. “Oh. _Him._ ” She would have happily erased all memory that Thomas Seymour had ever existed, but she supposed it was relevant, even if she suspected this conversation was going to conjure jealousy as well as anger. “Well, I _did_ ask. Maybe call him something else for the purposes of this conversation.”

After a moment, Cathy nodded. “I’ll call him David, as in the David and Bathsheba story. Charming, persuasive, feckless, and predatory.” She bit her lip. “The truth is, as I’ve said, I really did love him. I _wanted_ him, too. I’d had three political marriages during which I felt nothing; but _David_ set me on fire. I can’t say for sure whether I really wanted other men or other women before that, I just knew I wanted him then. And…” she shook her head. “He was good at it. He knew how take me absolutely to pieces, and by the time we married I was so badly burnt out that it was the only sensation that could pull me out of my fog. And then I became pregnant, and that was that.”

Anne resolutely suppressed the wave of anger and jealousy at the images that came, unbidden, from Cathy’s words. She’d know to expect the strong emotions, so she could control them somewhat. Anyway, she reminded herself, “David” had met the same bloody end she had, but he hadn’t come back. She had, and Cathy was in _her_ arms now.

She dragged her focus back around. “What changed?”

Cathy shrugged, as though it were obvious. “Well, _everything._ We came back, in a new time, with new bodies, having new experiences. I met you, and I started falling for your mind almost immediately. Then my body followed. It just…was. David set me on fire then, you set me on fire now, in different and better ways. I wanted him; I want you. I shouldn’t have trusted him. I _do_ trust you.” She paused to kiss Anne deeply, fingers tracing behind her ear and down her neck and making her gasp and whine. “We knew these kinds of desires happened then; we just didn’t make them or any other kind a matter of _identity._ Personally, that still seems to work with how I experience myself and my feelings and desires now; as I spend more time in this world, it may change. For you, from what you’re telling me, understanding it through identity may be important. That’s also fine.”

“I’ll tell you one more thing,” she continued. “Saint Paul and the rest were wrong. The ways I wanted David, never mind that we were man and wife, were _so_ much more a symptom of alienation than the ways I want you. I know that because they helped me justify hurting people. You and I, though? We chose to love each other through wanting the other one to hurt less. We started touching to help each other heal the wounds we’d made in our skin, and if that isn’t some small expression of Divine love I don’t know what is.”

Anne felt tears spring to her eyes, and she clung to Cathy desperately. Then she felt Cathy’s lips ever so gently at the corners of her eyes, then at her lips and her scarred neck, and as she finally gave herself over fully to the strange, familiar “disorder” she realized that while her skin burned and ached in the most exquisite ways, for once, it didn’t itch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like many in the fandom, I read all of the reincarnated queens as some kind of queer, because why the hell not? But I did want to disrupt the idea that they all either just came back suddenly gay and there couldn't have been any queerness in the sixteenth century, OR that they were all always statically gay then and now. Even *without* reincarnation, different people experience their queerness and the personal history of it in a variety of ways that complicate any kind of simplistic "born-this-way-ism." 
> 
> So for the purposes of this story, Anne has always been pretty darn gay, and also experiences that in ways that will intersect with what will be officially understood as her ADHD in other fics in this series. The modern concept of a sexual identity helps her make sense of this. Whereas at least for now, the premodern idea that sexuality didn't really have much to do with identity per se has more explanatory power for Cathy and makes more sense of her experiences to date--although given her strong Protestantism, the idea of a discrete, integrated individual identity that includes her sexuality will, in all likelihood, become more of a thing for her later on.
> 
> The idea of desiring one's own sex (and sexual 'misbehavior' more generally) being a consequence or symptom of greater alienation rather than being the main or initial problem really does fit premodern readings of Paul and the Church Fathers far better than a modern evangelical attitude in which gayness is somehow a discrete problem in and of itself. I'm drawing here in a general sense on Bernadette J. Brooten's "Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism" (Chicago, 1996).


End file.
